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Science, that's SmarterScience's business
This web site harbors a few gems and surprises. This page contains a gem.
I, Angelina Souren, owner of Smarterscience, am a marine biogeochemist and geologist.
On this page below, I explain how that came about.
How to become an earth scientist
I can only tell you how that happened to me, how I became an earth scientist. You may have to adapt this recipe to
your own personal circumstances.
I grew up in a part of the Netherlands
that has some interesting geology, but of course, I didn't know that as a child. I became pretty interested in science
quite early, though, and read about oceanography in a children's magazine called Taptoe
and later also in a magazine called Kijk.
It seems - so people have told me - that there was a time when I went around telling everyone
that I was going to go to the North Pole when I was all grown up. I never got around to that but
I did at some point have a trip to Antarctica - the South Pole - planned in my diary, with the
RV Polarstern. I was
able to explore this research vessel during the EPOS symposium when it happened to be in Bremerhaven.
One of the social events even took place aboard the ship.
That - my declaration that I was going to explore the North Pole - is not how I got to be an earth
scientist, though. It's a bit more complicated than that.
I read a lot as a kid (and I still do),
and was fascinated
by cowboys and indians, and by knights, too. King Arthur, Prince Valliant, and all that. So I staged all sorts of
battles and quests and
built lots of things that I could crawl into and hide in. I for instance remember covering the
kitchen table with blankets or sheets, decorating the edges with clothes pins, and declaring it a wigwam.
I also built many huts, all sort of huts. I created them from branches and ferns when I was in the woods, from
pieces of wood (and nails) in and around a peach tree, and indoors, from boxes. Later, I made a huge one out of
a giant shipping crate that had traveled all the way from Asia to which I added pieces of timber and whatnot and
cardboard taken from large whitegoods packaging boxes.
I kept a tin with special peanut-sliver-covered
cookies (Jan Hagel) and other little treasures there. Those particular cookies still bring back memories of this hut.
It was a lean-to, you could say, as it was next to the huge cooling facilities we had
on the premises, for my dad's business. On the outside, that walk-in refrigerator was lined with - well,
what did we know in those days - sheets of asbestos.
When you do stuff like that, you also often find yourself digging into the soil one way or another.
Looking for little treasures,
tending to the small garden I had or looking after my parents'. That's how it came about that one day, I found
a little piece of rock
with the imprint of half a shell (likely Miocene chert, see
this page which has a bit more background information or
this Naturalis page about the Miocene of the Netherlands, in Dutch).
How fascinating! I had never seen the sea yet here I had a rock with
a shell in it, at such a distance from the sea? I started looking for more!
Those were also the days when I wondered what the universe was sitting in. I pictured a giant playing with it, but
what was that giant sitting in, then? Everybody around me seemed to think it was pretty strange to
entertain such uninteresting questions so I let it go. (I kept feeling strangely guilty about that until
I read A Brief History of Time when I learned that someone else had entertained similar questions and ideas
and had actually looked into it.)
On top of that, I also had a chunk of flint that I actually used as a tool, and it was not until many years later
that I realized that
that was exactly what it must have been, a prehistoric tool. It was so perfect for the purpose for which I was using it
that it was too perfect, if you know what I mean.
My mother noticed my interest in rocks and minerals and when I was 11 or 12, we visited a mineral show in a little town
called Arcen. My mother bought me a book there, called Glans en gloed uit donkere diepten. It was pretty good!
My mother, however, was seriously ill. As a result, but also because of the emergence of the supermarket phenomenon,
my dad had to give up his own business and it just so happened that one of my dad's
new colleagues - I believe his name was Wim - was a rock collector. He made us familiar with a place called
Idar-Oberstein in Germany and after my mother had passed away, we went there a few times. I found lots and lots and
lots of rocks, mostly quartz varieties.
Now, you'd think that going straight to university to become a geologist after high school would have been the natural
thing to do. I did indeed ask for information about those courses of study, but the study guides said that you had to have
excellent grades and be in top-notch physical shape (a physical was recommended prior to undertaking the study of geology).
It
also mentioned that it was a relatively expensive course of study as it required
you to buy all sorts of equipment, and travel a lot.
So, I went on to study German language and literature instead. I quit after a few months. My German
skills were excellent, much
better than those of all or most of the other first-year students - thanks to Mr. Moers who taught us well and even
took us to a play in the German town of Aachen - but it just wasn't what I wanted to do and I
couldn't picture myself
teaching German language to high-school kids either. (Chemistry? Yes.)
Some five years later, I had myself tested extensively at a career counseling agency (I paid for all of it out of my own
pocket) and the resulting recommendation was to move to Wageningen and study
environmental science at Wageningen University.
That is when I remembered my former love. I registered for geology, which was then still taught at
the University of Amsterdam, but about to transfer to and merge with
the department of earth sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam,
from which I graduated with distinction. (It later merged with the department of life sciences.)
The story of how I later ended up in chemical oceanography - and more specifically, rare earth elements -
is at least as funny. I like the chemical aspects of things so
I had decided on petrology, mineralogy, isotope geology and geochemistry. (The sedimentology department
wouldn't exactly have minded if I had joined them either, though.) Still, I did sign up for a big chunk of concentrated
marine science at the end of my master's and I remember some students
joking "What are you doing here? Go back to your petrology!"
Well, one day, I believe it was a Friday, I was ill and skipped the morning's classes. Chemical oceanography was
scheduled for that afternoon.
Hein de Baar (NIOZ) -
introduced us to the topic.
Johan Schijf (who was
stationed in Amsterdam but employed at the
University of Utrecht and
is now based at the Chesapeake
Biological Laboratory) concluded the
lectures and offered us the possibility to tour the clean lab (then still part of SIGO,
NWO's isotope geology lab)
and take a closer look at his Ph.D. research. Only one
other girl and I took that tour and at the end, when I was still hanging around a bit, Jan made the following
crucial remark:
"We are
actually looking for someone to take over my research after I finish my Ph.D."
No, the rest is not, as they say, history maar "Wordt vervolgd" ("To be continued").
Yes, I will likely add some more images later (though most
of my photographs and slides from that era are in storage in the States). Yes, I aced that chemical oceanography exam.
I loved it!
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